Arnold Schoenberg Overview

The harmonic foundations on which Western music had rested since the Renaissance got a strong shaking in the earthquake that was Romanticism. Dissonant notes were sounded -- and left unresolved. In time, the need for a tonal center was questioned, and... [more]

The harmonic foundations on which Western music had rested since the Renaissance got a strong shaking in the earthquake that was Romanticism. Dissonant notes were sounded -- and left unresolved. In time, the need for a tonal center was questioned, and by the turn of the century, atonal music had arrived. One of the composers creating these shockwaves of atonality was Arnold Schoenberg, Viennese experimenter and originator of the 12-tone system. His early work explored the limits of atonal anarchy and the style known as Expressionism. The opera "Erwartung" ("Expectation," 1909) is a so-called monodrama with an intensely complex score. Sung by one voice, it concerns the meandering ravings of a woman searching for her lover in a moonlit forest. Sensing the need for method in this madness, Schoenberg gradually evolved a new system for dealing with the chromatic scale, which treated all 12 notes as equally important and arranged them in a "tone row." This row could then be used as a basis for counterpoint and various patterns. A new musical language was born, and Schoenberg employed it in a range of works for piano, string quartet, and orchestra. The 12-tone system arrived on the opera stage with "Von Heute auf Morgen" ("From One Day to the Next"). The story follows the comic arguments of a husband and wife who have returned home late from a party. Schoenberg's magnum opus for the opera followed a far more serious theme. "Moses und Aron," which he worked on for more than two decades and left unfinished, recounts the Biblical story. Emphasizing the conflict between thought and action, the former embodied by Moses and the latter by Aaron, the opera has only two long solo parts. A chorus is heavily used and expresses itself in speech as well as song, with a percussive effect. The work received its premiere in 1957, well after Schoenberg's death in southern California in 1951. He had settled there after fleeing Nazi persecution (he was Jewish), and had taught music for years at the University of California at Los Angeles. [show less]